AMD CEO Says the PS5 Will Have a ‘Special Sauce’

During an interview with CNBC, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) CEO Lis Su discussed some of what the company’s plan is for working with Sony on the PlayStation 5. If you’re unaware, AMD is the company building a computer chip for Sony’s next box, which we recently learned a lot about from a Wired interview. Apparently, it is something “special.”

The CNBC interview had this interesting tidbit from Su:

What we have done with Sony is really architect something for their application, for their special sauce. It’s a great honor for us. We’re really excited about what the next generation PlayStation will do.

This “special sauce” has gotten a lot of people excited. It’s not really much to go off of, but the simple fact that the system might have a major identifiable feature is telling. Up until this point, all we’ve heard is that it will be a beefier, more powerful version of what came before, so we’re thinking about what Su could have been alluding to. It could have just been an off-hand remark—but there is a lot of speculation on what it could mean.

From what we’ve learned so far, the PS5 will use an AMD chip with a CPU from the third-generation Ryzen. The CPU is “based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture,” according to the Wired interview with system architect, Mark Cerny.

It will also support physical media, have backwards compatibility with PS4, use a solid state drive, which will significantly lower loading speeds, and apparently support 8K visuals. It’s unclear how all of those features will be implemented, but they are confirmed to be present in the PS5, which isn’t officially even called the PS5 yet.

Going back to AMD, you might recall that they’re working with Google on their new Stadia platform, which will focus on streaming.

It’s unclear what this chip will be and involve, or if this “special sauce” is something that doesn’t have much significance, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.